Upcoming municipal elections

Following up on my post last week describing the composition of Durham's City Council, i had planned to write a bit about the players in municipal elections. By state law in North Carolina, municipal elections are "non-partisan," meaning that party affiliations are displayed neither on the ballot nor in campaign materials. So you won't see, for instance, signs saying "Thomas Stith, Republican for Mayor," or "Diane Catotti - Democrat," in the run up to the election.

Locally, the big players are the three independent political action committees (or PACs, not to be confused with the five Partners Against Crime districts in the city, also referred to as PACs. Those are almost always accompanied by the number of the district - PAC1, PAC2, etc., and rarely if ever involve themselves in electoral politics.).

I say "had planned," because Frank Hyman has a very good rundown of exactly that in this past Saturday's Durham News:

Durham is one of the very few places in the United States where candidates with the most money often lose the election.

Why? Because the big bucks don't translate into endorsements. Personal contacts and a history of civic involvement do.

Candidates without endorsements rarely get more than 400 or 500 votes from their friends, neighbors and fishing buddies. Your candidate will need more votes than that -- say, about 6,000 to 7,000 -- to survive the October primary. And that means getting at least one endorsement.

To win the general election in November, it'll take 10,000 to 15,000 votes. That means probably two endorsements. It's the candidate with a coalition of endorsements who wins.

Take a turn at a polling place handing out flyers and you'll see many voters turn up clutching an endorsement sheet clipped from the newspaper or received in the mail or handed out by another volunteer just like you -- except they're working for one of the big four political groups in town.

I'm not sure that i agree with Frank's assessment of Durham CAN as "one of the big four," but that's as likely to be a result of my ignorance as anything else. His analysis of the three main PACs, (The Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, The People's Alliance, and The Friends of Durham, referred to colloquially as the Committee, the PA, and the Friends, respectively)) though, is pretty spot on. Kevin's already commented on the, shall we say, unusal endorsement by the Friends, nominally a pro-business, pro-development group, of Diane Catotti, who is a long time member of the PA. And Frank highlights the interesting nature of the Committee's dillemma in the upcoming Mayor's race.

At endorsement meetings, turnout counts, but the ground rules have become arcane, because the Committee's Democratic leaders have been trying (with limited success) to stop Republican mayoral candidate Thomas Stith from packing the meetings with his supporters. With Mayor Bill Bell's re-election at stake, this is the fight to watch.

Close observers with long memories, will recall the 2003 council race, where Diane Catotti received the Committee's endorsement over Thomas Stith in the primary, only to lose it in the weeks before the general election. It didn't hurt her campaign, as she still finished as the highest votegetter, but the endorsement was enough to propel Stith into the third at-large seat, 104 votes ahead of Diane Wright, who had finished second in the primary, about 1400 votes ahead of Stith.

This year promises to be even more interesting.